Books by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Indian Cinema: A Very Short Introduction
Very Short Introductions, 2016
One film out of every five made anywhere comes from India. From its beginnings under colonial rul... more One film out of every five made anywhere comes from India. From its beginnings under colonial rule through to the heights of Bollywood, Indian cinema has challenged social injustices such as caste, the oppression of Indian women, religious intolerance, rural poverty, and the pressures of life in the burgeoning cities. Indian Cinema: A Very Short Introduction delves into the political, social, and economic factors which have shaped Indian cinema into a fascinating counterculture. Covering everything from silent cinema through to the digital era, it examines how the industry reflects the complexity and variety of Indian society through the dramatic changes of the 20th century, and into the beginnings of the 21st.
Tulika Books, 2009
Nowhere has the cinema made more foundational a public intervention than in India, and yet the In... more Nowhere has the cinema made more foundational a public intervention than in India, and yet the Indian cinema is consistently presented as something of an exception to world film history. What if, this book asks, film history was instead written from the Indian experience? Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid reconstructs an era of film that saw an unprecedented public visibility attached to the moving image and to its social usage. The cinema was not invented by celluloid, nor will it die with celluloid's growing obsolescence. But 'celluloid' names a distinct era in cinema's career that coincides with a particular construct of the twentieth-century state. This is not merely a coincidence: the very raison d'etre of celluloid was derived from the use to which the modern state put it, as the authorized technology through which the state spoke and as narrative practices endorsing its authority as producer of the rational subject.
ashish rajadhyaksha the last cultural mile:
Edited Compilations by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Tulika Books, 2015
The fifty-one essays compiled in this book were written over a forty-year period by India's leadi... more The fifty-one essays compiled in this book were written over a forty-year period by India's leading independent filmmaker. They provide new insights into a turbulent era in modern India's cultural history. Although known primarily as a filmmaker, Kumar Shahani has taught, spoken and written on a variety of subjects over this period, that include the cinema, but also politics, aesthetics, history and psychoanalysis. In these essays Shahani addresses diverse political issues, aesthetic practice, questions of artistic freedom and censorship. There are also personal essays on filmmakers and artists including his teachers and colleagues. Shahani's often polemical positions, as they occur in several previously unpublished essays and presentations, are essential contributions to film and cultural histories of the Indian cinema as well as of the New Cinema worldwide. The book includes a comprehensive introductory essay, "Kumar Shahani Now," by Ashish Rajadhyaksha.
Ashish RAJADHYAKSHA
P. Radhika
Raghavendra TENKAYALA
co-edited with Amrit Gangar
Framework n 30.31, 1986
Six essays by Kumar Shahani, with an Introduction and an Interview
Journalism by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Greatest? Or The Only?
Outlook India
The portrayal of Ray as Indian cinema's greatest iconic genius has its problems
Economic & Political Weekly, 2017
Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro went so far beyond ha-ha funny that it became, rather like the p... more Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro went so far beyond ha-ha funny that it became, rather like the pivotal moment in its plot, some kind of instant snapshot of Bombay and the India, of that time. It captured something so
gruesome that laughter became almost a last-resort action.
India Today, Jan 14, 2013
Visual Art Texts and Catalogues by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946, 2017
This is a public art event, addressing a political and historical conjuncture in a form that conn... more This is a public art event, addressing a political and historical conjuncture in a form that connects together a diversity of means: of inquiry, of address, of speech. For all its specificity-it was in the end an insurrection led by the sailors of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay in February 1946the incident resonates with questions that have beset modern history: around how political meaning is created, how symbolic action and historical agency may be named: how history is, in the end, both made and not made.
Domus India Vol 28, 2014
This detailed essay explores three of the five-episode show celebrating
50 years of an astonishin... more This detailed essay explores three of the five-episode show celebrating
50 years of an astonishing journey in the contemporary art world;
curated by Geeta Kapur, these exhibitions are not nostalgic reiterations
of that existence, but a strategy of both conception and exhibition that
jostles against both, the history of that journey and other histories of
contemporary Indian art. These exhibitions are very much the present,
but the art is set against a memory space.
Third Text 062 VOLUME 17 ISSUE 1 MARCH 2003, 2003
Visuality and visual art: speculating on a link
Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, New York, Asia …, Jan 1, 2005
Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001
Iwona Blazwick (ed.) Century Cuty: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, London: Tate Publishing., 2001
Catalogue of exhibition curated by Ashish rajadhyaksha, at Jawahar kala Kendra, Jaipur
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Books by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Edited Compilations by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Journalism by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
gruesome that laughter became almost a last-resort action.
Visual Art Texts and Catalogues by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
50 years of an astonishing journey in the contemporary art world;
curated by Geeta Kapur, these exhibitions are not nostalgic reiterations
of that existence, but a strategy of both conception and exhibition that
jostles against both, the history of that journey and other histories of
contemporary Indian art. These exhibitions are very much the present,
but the art is set against a memory space.